← Tuesday, October 13, 2026ArchitectureCase study

A commercial web app in C uses CGI, SQLite and one binary

prophitt.me 6 min read Editor score 7/10

A shipped product uses OpenBSD, C, httpd and SQLite, with no framework or required JavaScript. It offers a concrete, compact architecture to compare against the stacks and operational complexity common in modern web services.

What: A commercial web app built in C uses CGI, SQLite, and a single statically linked binary.
How: Apache httpd runs a fresh CGI process for each request; the program accesses SQLite directly and serves assets from memory.
Why it matters: Replacing one binary deploys a new version without a server restart or downtime, with few moving parts to maintain.

httpd sends requests to the CGI binary, which accesses the SQLite database. Sketched from the article's own text.

Read on prophitt.me → Hacker News · 223 comments Lobsters · 8 comments

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